


kiss me goodbye

by shyflowersbloom



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: BOM Keith, Black Paladin Keith, Character Study, Feelings, Fluff, Garrison - Freeform, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Post Series, Sort Of, Super Soft, Surprise Kiss, Time Skips, controversial first person, lance catches feelings like the sun sets, slowly and then all at once, this is soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:40:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24727618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shyflowersbloom/pseuds/shyflowersbloom
Summary: Twice they said goodbye with a kiss, and once they didn't need to.We have scars all over, now. There are things more important now than licking the sticky mess off this boy’s mouth. There are more important things than the way my heart is trembling in this cage I call my chest.“I believed you,” Keith says, as he draws away and to his feet.I will spend the rest of our hike wondering what might have happened if I had lost myself just seconds more, and kissed that boy. I think I might know. I think he may have kissed me back.
Relationships: Keith/Lance (Voltron)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 53





	kiss me goodbye

**standing out**

The sun bleeds into the sky as it sets over the sonoran desert. It casts shadows and an orange glow over the parking lot where we’re playing kickball. My team is winning. I’m about to take the shot, the final kick to end the game, when I see him.

Haloed in gold, there is a silhouette at the edge of the roof. He is small, and catches wind in his shirt and long hair.

I fumble my feet, and Hunk steals the ball.

Still caught on the boy on the roof, the rest of the players blur past me in a herd, my eyes itch from dust. I blink, but he’s still there.

I’m scared he might jump. But he doesn’t.

The sun sets. My team wins. No thanks to me, of course.

~

My left canine tooth catches in my pencil for the fifth time this exam. Falling behind means losing a chance to become fighter class. These questions stretch my brain like a rubber band. My knee bounces underneath my desk. What point is there anyway? None of the teachers like me. They’re always shushing me, sending me to the principles and on occasion the nurse. There’s one cadet that makes me look like a saint, though. And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t do it on purpose.

But I wouldn’t know. No one would. He never talks to the others. Never plays ball, or studies with groups in the library.

I wonder why. I forget about the test, recalling that evening and its sunset in an explosion of colour. I think I know.

But it’s just like the answer to my test question: a guess.

~

The cafeteria is a soup of odd smells and a roar of gossip. That’s why he stands out. He’s quiet. The sort of quiet that reminds me of the tide pools at my favorite beach. Standing still. Cool. A glassy reflection, a studied inspection. Eyes that glint like dark dark glass, smoothed from the sea.

“Mind if I sit?” I ask, but don’t wait for an answer.

I know what his voice sounds like, but it’s still foreign to hear. “Uh. Okay?”

Normally, I can out talk a flock of gulls, but today, my words stick to the back of my throat. “Tough exam this morning, right?”

“It was alright.”

Lunch has never tasted so dry. I ask myself what possessed me to sit here, I really wonder why.

Then I remember that night I saw him on the roof, and I have my answer.

~

A week after they announce the missing Kerberos crew, there is a service to honour the pilot and crew. I remember seeing Shiro in the halls. One of the most handsome instructors around. One of the most kind, too. I’d never forget that part either.

That afternoon, Keith is not in class. He may not take protocol and rules well, but he still shows up. I nibble on my pencil til the bell rings, and it’s so deformed I toss it in a bin on my way out of the east lobby.

When I was six, I had a kitten dark as licorice. I called him Frijol, he loved to lick my feet. Then one day he went missing, and I spent the next three weeks searching high and low for him. I never saw his black silky fur or his blue sky eyes again.

Keith is not a lost kitten, but I find as I wind through the buildings of the Garrison, that same hard and prickly fear lodges in my chest.

One day I was out running, and I saw Keith and Shiro getting onto bikes, and streaking across the desert. They left behind a trail of dust, and it caught in my nose. It may have just been the wind, but I swear I heard Keith laugh.

No one is on the roof. I scurry up by way of a gutter and check for myself. From there, I can see across the whole campus. Some buildings are small, sitting like tin boxes set in straight lines. The air is hot and flares against my skin.

I’ve given up on finding him, and it’s funny how that works, because as I stop at a vending machine for a coke to cool me off, I see him at the end of the hall. He’s coming toward me. A bag is slung over his shoulder. It doesn’t look heavy. Not heavier than Keith, anyway.

My soda drops in the machine, but I leave it there. I step into the middle of the hall, and Keith’s eyes bore into me.

“Hey,” I say, and feel my heart jump.

Keith glares down at his civilian sneakers. “What?”

“I was looking for—” I swallow. “Someone. To help me study for the next exam. Would you. . .?”

Now, there is three feet between us. Keith stops walking. He stares at me, until the hair on my neck prickles. “I can’t. I’m leaving.”

“Leaving?”

“Expelled.”

“Oh. . .”

Why? I wonder why. I see the coals burning in his eyes, I hear what his laugh might sound like, from some very dusty and distant memory. I think I know.

Then, like the suddenness of a dust storm, I am caught up and swept away. It’s like I weigh nothing. I never saw it coming, I can assure you.

Keith shoves me against the wall. Keith kisses me.

Our front teeth knock together, and I taste blood. It’s bright, like the sun when it burns low in the sky. It sinks into my tongue and slides down my throat, bitter.

My hands shoot out, to shove him away, but the boy is already running. I lose my balance, plowing through empty air. Keith runs, and bursts through the escape to the east lobby. The door echoes when it slams behind him.

I think it will be the last time I ever see that quiet, angry boy.

I forget my coke, but I do not forget him.

* * *

**this will not be our end**

When I was little, I was frightened by the dark. Bad dreams chased me into my parent’s bed more times than I can count. Finally, Papi came up with a solution. He stuck glow in the dark stars across my bedroom ceiling. After that, I fell asleep to their minty blue glow and woke up to see them hanging above me, making the dark softer and safer for scared little boys.

Now I am older, and the stars are not plastic but bodies burning bright for as far as I can see. I still sit and watch them, and remember what it was like to feel safe.

It wasn’t until Shiro went missing (again) that I found myself chasing after them more often than not. For the longest time I still believed we’d all make it back to earth, back to our homes. I wanted to hope. But now, that dream has been torn right from my hands. There will be no happy homecoming. There can be no false security.

It’s just like I’m four again. The only thing I can do is sit in silence, and watch the stars.

~

This planet smells like coriander. The leaves in the trees hang in ombres of red and the night sky is pink velvet. Coran tells us the white puffy flowers are edible, and as we traverse through the forest, our cheeks are stuffed full and our fingers are sticky.

“These are like marshmallow plants,” Hunk says, with nothing less than a tear of joy.

“He’s right,” I say, and glance over at Keith. “You’ve gotta try some.”

“I was never a big fan of marshmallows,” he supplies.

This will not stand. It cannot. I won’t _let_ it.

I pause long enough to pluck a fistful of sugary buds from a patch of flowers then creep up behind my target. All of my muscles are in practiced shape, so the motion is easy enough. Legs push, arms grab. I catch him around the waist, and tackle him into tall grass, fragrant of spices.

“Lance,” he yelps, and catches me by the wrists.

For a moment everything else stops. It’s just the two of us, rolling in the brush, fighting over some sappy white plant. I shove a hand to his mouth, and smear it across his face. From down the path, the others have glanced back to chuckle at the spectacle.

I wish it could be like this always. Keith would not have to be heavier than a planet with worry. We could be soft like marshmallows, sweet like white sugar. It sounds silly, it’s utterly sappy but in that moment it’s all I want.

Keith grapples me with his legs, and vaults me over and onto my back. It knocks the breath out of me, and he pins me there and he smells so nice it makes my head spin. There is still goo clinging to his chin, to his lips. There is colour in his face and an almost smile tracing his eyes.

“I told you they tasted like marshmallows,” I breathe.

But all I can think about, is that I know what it would taste like if I would push myself out of the earth and capture those perfect lips. They’re very symmetrical, I’ve noticed, except for the faintest of scars near the top right corner. I wonder how it got there, and how long it has been there.

We have scars all over, now. And this is when I come crashing back to reality. There are things more important now than licking the sticky mess off this boy’s mouth. There are more important things than the way my heart is trembling in this cage I call my chest.

“I believed you,” Keith says, as he draws away and to his feet.

I will spend the rest of our hike wondering what might have happened if I had lost myself just seconds more, and kissed that boy. I think I might know. I think he may have kissed me back.

~

The Castle is like a revolving door of people going missing, people coming back. Paladins trading lions like they’re pokémon. It makes my head spin.

At least Shiro comes back. At least Keith can smile again.

Except it isn’t long until he announces he’s leaving. He’s going to step into the role of a Blade. A faceless, danger flirting Blade. It causes something to rip straight down the middle inside of me. Because it’s not what I want. But I’m too in shock to tell him. If I were thinking clearly, I might drag him right back and sit him down and tell him whatever he’s running away from, he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t have to face it alone, either. Because I’d be there to help. I could try, at least. That counts for something, right?

Our group, such an odd family, circles around Keith to hug him. To hold him for just a little longer. My face finds his shoulder, and I burrow in close and will my eyes to stay dry.

Would he stay, if I asked?

I don’t know. I’m not brave enough to guess.

It’s like that day Keith was expelled. Later, I found out why. Iverson came into class the next day with an eye patch, and that was all I needed to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

When I was in that hallway, watching him run out the door, there wasn’t anything I could do to stop him. Maybe nothing has changed, in that regard. Except for one thing. This time, I will say goodbye. This time, I will say _come back. Be safe. Stay okay._

So it’s just me, running to the hangar where Keith will be, loading up his pod. Just the two of us, like it seems to be a lot. It’s okay. It’s just a lot, sometimes.

“Hey,” I call to him.

Keith pauses, midstep into the cockpit. “Lance?”

“I wanted to see you off. I wanted to say goodbye.”

“Isn’t that what that was on the bridge? A goodbye?” he says.

I don’t wither, under his dark dark gaze. “That was a group farewell. This is a goodbye, just for us. I wanted. . . I wanted to tell you.”

“Oh yeah?” Keith says, and he watches me, thinking, wheels turning in his head. Then he hops back down, and walks to me. “Well, goodbye, Lance.”

“Goodbye, Keith.”

Everything is live between us, and it crackles like dry lightning. I want to hug him. I want to do more than that, but a hug will be fine too. So I spread my arms wide open, and step into him, wrapping myself up in him. His hands are a fluttering weight down my back and _holy crow_ I need to bite my lip to keep myself from whimpering.

Keith’s voice rumbles through me. “It might be awhile before I see you again.”

“Don’t say that,” I say, and neither of us lets go.

“Lance?”

“Hm?”

“I’m. . .”

I inch back, to see his face and the frown that has sprouted there.

“I’m going to ask you something,” he tells me. “And I want you to know you can just say no. It’s okay.”

“Okay?”

“Can I.” Keith swallows, and my eyes trace the bob of his adam’s apple. “May I. . . kiss? Kiss _you?”_

His hands feel like hot irons through my shirt, still pressed along my spine. The bite of mint is on his skin, and his breath tickles my neck. It’s probably a good thing he’s still holding onto me, or my knees may have very well given out and I’d be on the floor by now.

“Kiss me?” I whisper.

Keith nods, eyelids heavy as his gaze is on me.

“Yes. Okay. You can. You may— mmph!”

I am of course, no expert on kissing Keith Kogane, but this time is very different from our first. His perfect lips are like a caress to mine, and it really feels like a goodbye. A proper goodbye, like. . . he might not get to do this again.

 _No._ I cannot abide the thought.

I press on, burning brightly through my whole body, and I hope it tells him that this won’t be our last, that he will come back. A goodbye is not an end. He has to know.

This goodbye will not be our end.

If I know anything about Keith he will be back. He will.

There is no space that could be enough to keep us both apart.

* * *

**we will do it well**

_“It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.”_

That’s my sister Rachel’s favorite quote. She loves poetry, and loves Mary Oliver just as much. Sometimes I think she’s destined to become a great name, known for the words that she spins, like the fairytale of the girl that spun straw into gold.

We sit in the softest grass along the bank, and she threads her fingers through my hair as she reads aloud. My eyes keep shutting, and every now and again my chest will jump awake for a lungful of air. The day is perfect, sunlight through the trees, the trickle of the creek. It may not be Veradero beach but it still serves well to soothe me and lull me into sleep.

If I could go back a few years and tell younger me that everything would be okay, that I will be back home and I will get to hug my family again, I would. Just so he doesn’t have to feel so lonely, sitting and watching the stars night after night. Just so hoping doesn’t fracture his weatherbeaten heart quite as much.

“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world. . . before I knew at all who I was, or what I was, or what I wanted to be,” Rachel reads from _Upstream,_ and I feel a tug in my chest that tells me it’s true.

~

In the greenhouse, I’m growing many kinds of seeds. Someday they will be flowers, someday they will make a garden. They will be fields of magenta. For now, I take my tin watering can and feed what I cannot yet see. I have hope they will grow. I will tend to them like they already are. I hum to them while the hose runs, filling the can up again.

“Everyone said you’d be out here, with the flowers.”

I drop the can. It narrowly misses my toes. The water gurgles across the packed earth and the hose jerks from water pressure when it hits the ground, wriggling like a worm.

“Keith!” I’m already running, almost tripping to where he stands four rows away.

He is strong, and reminds me of this with hands that catch me at my waist and pick me up, and spin me. I was dizzy with delight but now, all I can do is hold on and close my eyes, and feel the split of a smile across my face.

It’s been too long, since he’s come back. Weeks. A month, almost? I don’t count anymore, because it just worries me. He doesn’t always know when he can steal away from his duties long enough to visit.

When he sets me back to my feet, my arms stay wrapped around his neck. He’s so handsome, in the brightly lit greenhouse, dark hair curling and shining in a soft way. “How long?” I ask. “How long do we have?”

“A day,” he says, and keeps his smile securely pinned in place.

I try not to falter, for his sake. Our pain can be shared while we are apart, and not now. Now is for us, for us to be happy and to forget he will leave again.

We have practiced, and now we do it well.

~

If there were a map for his body I would have no need of it. Nights we have spent, exploring and memorizing. I hold him, and I do it like he’s the only thing that keeps me from floating away.

He must know what he does to my heart, to my body, my soul. Can he see it in my eyes? Can he hear it in my voice? If he can’t, he must not be able to see at all, or hear a blessed thing.

I kiss up and down his arm, and linger at the inside of his wrist. The night is balmy, and the crickets are singing from outside of our open window. If I am too warm, it is his fault, because he makes me burn at his touch. If I am breathless, it’s all his fault too, for I have always had trouble keeping up with him.

“I don’t want to say goodbye again,” I whisper into the shell of his ear.

“We promised we wouldn’t talk about this. Not while I’m here.”

“But when _will_ we talk about it? Is this how it’s going to be? Forever?” I wrap him up in my arms and pull him in with my legs, so there can be no inch of distance between us. “Is this what our future will be like? I don’t think I can go on this way much longer, Keith.”

“Okay.” His chest rises, then falls as he sighs. “Okay, Lance. What do you want me to do?”

“Take me with you.”

Up to the stars. Up where they burn, as brightly as we do.

“You know why I can’t,” he says.

I trace a finger along the cut of his cheekbones, and this is when I feel his skin is wet. Keith is crying. I would never have guessed, in the dark. Not when he sounds so steady. When he feels so present.

“Well, you know what _I think._ Blade rules are stupid. So what? Take me anyway. Kolivan wouldn’t turn me out.”

“I can’t just disrespect their code. It’s ancient,” Keith reminds me. “Their order is sacred to them, and I can’t bring an outsider inside.”

I kiss the coolest spot of his face, underneath his wet eyes. “Listen to you, following the rules.”

He becomes so still, I must strain to hear his breath. He becomes so quiet, I’m afraid what thoughts are forming in that stubborn head of his.

“There is one thing,” he says finally. “But you might not like it.”

“. . . Okay.”

“You can’t come to live with me in the Blade’s base as my boyfriend.”

“I _know.”_

“But, if you weren’t my boyfriend-”

“Are you breaking up with me?”

“No.” Keith grabs both my hands, and holds them to his chest. “I’m proposing.”

My heart thuds. “Proposing?”

“My husband could come with me. My husband would be accepted. It’s in their code. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a single drop of galran blood.”

“Your husband?” I parrot.

Keith huffs, and lets go of my hands. “It was just a suggestion.”

I grab his face and kiss him until I can’t breathe, and then I kiss him a little longer. I remember when I was little, and my grandparents told me their engagement story. There was flowers. There was a sunset stroll on the beach. There was an heirloom ring. I thought it was the most wonderful and romantic thing I could imagine.

It’s really nothing compared to this, though. Because now I could fly to New Altea and back. I could move mountains, I could shout and the moon might hear it.

“You stupid, brilliant, beautiful dork,” I whisper. “I think that’s the best idea you’ve ever had.”

“It is?” he says, breathless. Like he doesn’t believe.

“It is.”

I remember that time I saw him standing on the roof of the garrison, how seeing him made me feel more alive. It’s been that way ever since. Now, even in the dark, as the moon is too dim to shine past the curtains, it is bright. Brighter than all the colours of a desert sunset. It’s like fire in our veins, and I know in my heart, it will be this way always. Because we were always meant to go on. We were always meant to be together. We were always meant to stand out.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr @shyflowersbloom  
> check out my other fics for [ soft, post war klance ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21448753/chapters/51112006) or [ a telepathy au ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17730857/chapters/41831138)


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